Richard Gaikowski, who left his tiny South Dakota town to see the world and ultimately found that world in the eclectic stew of San Francisco's psychedelic era as a writer and filmmaker, died Friday in San Francisco.

He was known around town for decades as a figure in the arts and a bon vivant who would try anything once, even if it didn't last. He drove a cab in the early 1980s but hit a pedestrian his first day on the job.

"Richard just had a bohemian air about him," said his friend Ken Tray, the executor of Mr. Gaikowski's estate. "He was on the edge of soul."

"He was a hip cat," said another friend, Jay Hanke. "He was a beatnik."

For Mr. Gaikowski, those days were a whirlwind of life in tie-dyed San Francisco at a time when everything appeared to be free and widely available - - love, sex, dope and anything to do with the arts.

Mr. Gaikowski was born in Watertown, S.D., and raised in Webster, S.D. He graduated from Webster High School in 1954, spent a year at Northern State College (now Northern State University) in Aberdeen, S.D., then was drafted. His two years in the Army, largely spent as a medic, opened his eyes to the possibilities of the world outside South Dakota. After the Army, he finished up at Northern State, did a brief stint as a press aide to then-Gov. Ralph Herseth and lit out for the east.

He fetched up at the (now defunct) Albany Knickerbocker-News, in upstate New York, where Fred LeBrun, now a columnist for the Albany Times-Union, remembers Mr. Gaikowski for "a series he did here on migrant workers. He spent about three weeks as a migrant worker -- this was the age of the actuality reporter -- and he wrote a terrific, warm series.

"He was very much of an activist journalist," LeBrun said. "He was moved by all the issues of the time -- the Vietnam War, Kent State (University, where the National Guard killed four student protesters), the freedom rides, workers' rights."

But he left the paper in 1970 and moved to the Bay Area, stopping first at the Martinez newspaper, then moving to San Francisco and joining the thriving life in the Haight.

"He was a true dropout," Tray said. "He was part of the radical hippie Good Times Commune, back around 1970, he helped put out the Good Times Paper, and he was always interested in the arts. He started making small films, like 'My Black Film.' " Mr. Gaikowski "had some emotional turmoil in the 1970s," Tray said, and ultimately went through "long-term Jungian analysis."

In 1976, Mr. Gaikowski and the late Robert Evans took over a Mission district porno movie theater called the Roxie and converted it into an emporium for art films and independent movies. Mr. Gaikowski also formed One Way Films, a distribution company for independent films.

In the late 1970s, Mr. Gaikowski made his big film, "Deaf Punk," described in a 1981 Chronicle review of new wave films as "an enigmatic joining of a band called the Offs and their audience at the S.F. Deaf Club."

"It was a short, very cool film," Tray said. The film came about because Mr. Gaikowski noticed that "the punks were hanging out in the area of the Deaf Club, around 16th and Valencia. The Deaf Club was a social club."